HOMILY ON PROCRASTINATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 213, 8 September 1923, Page 27

HOMILY ON PROCRASTINATION.

'That procrastination is the "thief of time has become proverbial; but is there any other notable saying which is co inadequate? For merely to call procrastination a thief of time, when it is really a equanderer of opportunity, is to reduce one of the seven deadly sine to an almost negligible fault," writes "J-EJ." in the "Birmingham Poet." "The horror which a habit of procrastination should excite is the less because .60 few of us value time. We seem to have so much and we are co seldom conscious that -there is any real loss in putting off till to-morrow those unpleasant things we should do to-day. "To a great extent this is because -we are not reflective; we make no attempt to trace an effect to its cause. And yet how often are our failures attributable to procrastination? We aTe going to do it, ibut where was the urgency! To-morrow —yes, but did we not know, what moralists have -been urging all through the ages, that To-morrow, aid to-morrow, and to-morrow creeps in this petty place from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death' ? "It is thus by no means a loes that ■we can gauge. If I have thrown away an opportunity, not deliberately, but because of sloth, can I ever estimate the cumulative effect on character and circumstance? The opportunity, it is true, may not 'be final—it is the very uncertainty which lulls us—hut as St. Augufitine tells us, XJod has promised forgivenes to (our) repentance, but He has not promised to-morrow to (our) procrastination.' "'There is no vice which colours the whole of life —entering into the warp and woof of it —more than procrastination. At school, the boy who 'means to work hard' find that others with less advertised good intentions carry off all the prizes. And, without knowing it, tie ie laying a heavy and fatal handicap on his future, not so much by what he , is actually losing in education as by the steady growth of a pernicious habit. "In 'business the man who does not e'eize the opportunity, making it his very own, passes it on to someone else. Xothingstands still, andwhile one dreams of what he will do instead of getting it done, another is before him, the market is stale. "Young's The Complaint; or Mght Xhoughte on Life, Death and Immortality,' is not co popular as when Robespierre slept with it under his pillow and the French people generally (Diderot and Madame d e Stael amon'<* them) admired it as mud as they did ■Clarissa Harlowe' and Ossian. Xor ie it Scripture. But what this eighteenth century 'ornament to religion and literature' wrote should be quoted in full or not at all. — Procraetination is t,e thipf of timeYear after year it stejils till all are li«l And to the mercies nf a moment leaves The vast foncerus of an eternal scene